Blogger & media professor Chuck Tryon caught the World Premiere of Date Number One on May 13. Here are a couple of paragraphs from his review of the movie, which was the very first review of DNO:
" Like the characters in Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes who reflect on concepts of celebrity and fame, Date Number One's twentysomethings find themselves returning to certain questions, in Date's case the potential relationship between quantum mechanics and Buddhism, with varying degrees of seriousness and authority. The conversations provide some degree of unity between the various episodes, but more importantly, the conversations seem to suggest the way in which ideas or concepts can weave their way through a community of artists and readers who spend a lot of time in bookstores and coffeehouses. An overheard snippet of conversation might be picked up by someone else, and the questions about Buddhism and quantum mechanics take an unexpected direction.
Finally, I think Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One offers an image of urban culture that might be understood as the anti-Crash depiction of life in the city. Instead of a city or community marked by distrust and hostility between racial and ethnic groups, Sujewa's film depicts a comfortably multi-ethnic community, recalling for me the "sidewalk ballet" described by Jane Jacobs in her wonderful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, rather than the sidewalk mosh pit imagined by Haggis. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't hostile encounters like the ones imagined in Crash, but Date Number One offers a notion of "contact" that is far more subtle, at least in my experience on the sidewalks and in the bookshops and coffeehouses of the cities where I've lived.
If I have made Ekanayake's film sound overly serious, it's unintentional. In fact, Date Number One is quite funny..."
Read the rest of the review here.
The next screening of Date Number One, screening # 10, will happen on Thursday, August 31, 9 PM at the Pioneer Theater in New York City. That screening will be the New York Premiere of the movie. Here's Pioneer's page for the movie & here's the link for buying tickets. See you there if you can make it. it will be a fun event.
- Sujewa
" Like the characters in Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes who reflect on concepts of celebrity and fame, Date Number One's twentysomethings find themselves returning to certain questions, in Date's case the potential relationship between quantum mechanics and Buddhism, with varying degrees of seriousness and authority. The conversations provide some degree of unity between the various episodes, but more importantly, the conversations seem to suggest the way in which ideas or concepts can weave their way through a community of artists and readers who spend a lot of time in bookstores and coffeehouses. An overheard snippet of conversation might be picked up by someone else, and the questions about Buddhism and quantum mechanics take an unexpected direction.
Finally, I think Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One offers an image of urban culture that might be understood as the anti-Crash depiction of life in the city. Instead of a city or community marked by distrust and hostility between racial and ethnic groups, Sujewa's film depicts a comfortably multi-ethnic community, recalling for me the "sidewalk ballet" described by Jane Jacobs in her wonderful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, rather than the sidewalk mosh pit imagined by Haggis. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't hostile encounters like the ones imagined in Crash, but Date Number One offers a notion of "contact" that is far more subtle, at least in my experience on the sidewalks and in the bookshops and coffeehouses of the cities where I've lived.
If I have made Ekanayake's film sound overly serious, it's unintentional. In fact, Date Number One is quite funny..."
Read the rest of the review here.
The next screening of Date Number One, screening # 10, will happen on Thursday, August 31, 9 PM at the Pioneer Theater in New York City. That screening will be the New York Premiere of the movie. Here's Pioneer's page for the movie & here's the link for buying tickets. See you there if you can make it. it will be a fun event.
- Sujewa
